Gratitude and Happiness, a Little Story

If you have been on a conscious journey for a fulfilled life, you may have come across literature which puts a lot of emphasis on the concept of gratitude. From my own experiences, I can only agree to that. Noticing the good things in your life is great! – Being thankful for them takes the positive feeling one step further.

If there’s a lack of thankfulness for the things we have in our lives, our vitality is far from being what it could be. Again, many of these concepts tie in with others that come up when it comes to the topic of a fulfilled life, like the popular metaphor of the half full or half empty glass.
Let us assume there’s a man (or woman, pick your preferred protagonist) who isn’t grateful for the good things in his life and only focuses on the things that don’t go according to plan. The body is noticed when it is ill in any way. The colleagues are noticed when they are annoying. Personal space and freedom are noticed when they are restricted. Time is noticed when there is none left. Money is noticed when there is a lack of it. The weather is noticed when it is too cold, too hot or too windy. Material things are noticed when they break or can’t be afforded. People are noticed when they behave badly…which then results in a general feeling of discontent and being unhappy with the world at large.
For this man, the glass would be half empty. The negative perspective results in a mindset that deprives him from all the good things in life.

Let us assume this man decides to work on his attitude and then begins to focus on things in his life for which he can be thankful. In the beginning, he is having a hard time, as the victim-of-circumstance-mode is still dominating most of his thinking. But then, there are little things that he begins to notice and he decides to be thankful for these things:

For all those years, his body has carried him through this life and made so many experiences possible. His body was healthy most of the time, even though he has put it though many unhealthy experiences. He begins to be thankful for his beating heart and his immune system, his hands and his mind, his senses and his ability to move from place to place.

He looks at his home and sees all the things that he owns. There were so many occasions in his life where he was able to buy something or where he was given something by others. He remembers how he worked towards buying something new and how he took the things for granted only a short while after he had bought them. When they broke after a few years or became boring or outdated, he was usually angry for having spend money on them, instead of being happy about them while he used them.
He decides to be thankful for every thing that he owns and owned in his whole life. He also realizes, that it was far more than he actually needed.

He looks at his bank account and realizes that, even if he spent all his money, there were always ways in which new money came to him every month. He decides to be thankful for all the money that he himself or others had spent for him in his whole life and feels the abundance that had been hiding behind his attitude of fear and lack for all those years.

He begins to find many things in his life for which he can be thankful. His loved ones and the moments he has and had with them, beautiful weather, flowers and trees in all the gardens around him, the food he eats every day, his clothes, all the people who had been kind to him, his bed, his bathroom, his home, electricity, technology and many many other things that make up his life. And of course time – we are all given the same number of hours per day.

He begins to notice less negative things in his life. He can’t say whether it is because there actually are less negative things, or because he had decided to look at life from a different angle. He loses interest in ranting about the things that don’t go according to plan and turns them into challenges – with his mind focused on all the things that he is thankful for.

This man’s glass is no longer half empty.
Seeing the good things in his life and being thankful for them every day made the difference.